Killed at the Whim of a Hat

Three

A day after the discovery of the VW they had the entire vehicle uncovered and they’d ferried the bones to the army hospital in Prajuab. There was talk of the case being taken over by the main station in Lang Suan, the nearest ‘city’ (sorry, I chuckled again). It was only twenty kilometers away but I couldn’t let that happen. This was my case and I wanted it to stay local, within cycling distance. I’d phoned the Pak Nam station four times since that Saturday afternoon, only to be told there’d been no developments in the case and that I should be patient. My patience had expired. I demonstrated good manners and warned them I was coming in to see them on Sunday.

I arrived at the Pak Nam police station at ten a.m. The building was the usual white, two-story concrete affair with a wide forecourt surrounded by token displays in flower beds: either a humble psychological ploy to calm violent criminals or a sign of the lack of anything else to do. The elderly man at the desk — Sergeant Phoom, he said his name was — beamed with sincere joy when I told him who I was. He was a soft, happy-uncle type with cropped white hair and teeth like rectangles of tapped rubber drying on a line.

“Constables Ma Yai and Ma Lek told me all about you,” he said. “You met ‘em at the dig site. Remember? They’re around here somewhere. Thai Rat newspaper, isn’t it? My word, you must have lived an exciting life for someone so young, mixing with all those celebrities and political nobs.”

I couldn’t hold back a laugh.

“I was…am on the crime desk,” I told him. “I mix with exactly the same lowlifes that you do here: criminals, murderers…”

“Here?” He looked surprised. “We haven’t had any serious crime here since they put the Burmese fishermen on a curfew in 2005. One murderer in the past three years and he was so drunk he couldn’t find his way from the crime scene. He was there waiting for us sleeping like a baby. We get the odd domestic dispute, kids smoking ganja and chewing on buzzy hai gratom leaves. That’s pretty much it.”

My heart sank.

“Otherwise, it’s community policing,” he continued. “A lot of meetings, traffic control, the young people’s club, football. But this VW thing, I tell you, this is the one we’ll all be talking about for years to come. Plus you being here, of course.” (I felt a lump of embarrassment.) “I’m afraid the major’s not around today. It’s supposed to be his day off but he was dragged away to Lang Suan for some emergency or other. I’m sure he would have liked to see you.”

I wasn’t so sure, but I was relieved to see he’d made it out of the toilet.

“So you’d be here on some type of update, I’d imagine.” Sergeant Phoom was a man who liked to talk. “We ran out and got some Pepsi when we heard you were coming. Hope you’re thirsty. We weren’t sure what you liked so we got Coke, too. Never can be too careful. Diet Coke, I think it is, just in case you’re on one. But I can see you have no need to be.”

In all my years in Chiang Mai police stations I’d never been welcomed so warmly as a member of the press. The sergeant offered to take me up to the briefing room but he looked uneasy about leaving the desk unattended so I told him I’d find it. Most stations have a standard, unimaginative floor plan: open reception downstairs with bus station seats in front of the desk, interview rooms leading off to the right and the left, fines paid to a cashier behind reception, offices upstairs, briefing room at the end, couple of small cells out the back. It was one more example of the lack of individuality that typified Thai policing, in my mind. Where was the splash of color, the gay idiosyncrasy? The answer to that question I found at the end of the hall.

The sign, BREIFING ROOM, over the door was so small you’d hardly notice the spelling mistake. The door was open and inside the room sat Constable Ma Yai and another officer with the stripes of a police lieutenant but the mannerisms of a fairy. He stood and clapped his hands delicately.

“Our angel has arrived,” he said.

I’d met gay policemen before. When Sissi was in her prime as a cabaret star she introduced me to a lot of her boyfriends. She had a thing for uniforms. She’d started with postmen, then worked her way up through the police ranks until reaching her ultimate high: an air force fighter pilot called Bin. But, excluding the postal workers, I’d never met a man in uniform who didn’t overcompensate on the side of male testosterone when he was on the job. This officer put up no such pretense. He introduced himself as Police Lieutenant Chompu and gave me a deep wai just short of a curtsy. I loved him instantly. I had no idea how Lieutenant Chompu had passed his medical and his oral exam and why he still remained active in a police force that rejected applicants for the most insignificant reasons, but at that moment I could only smile with admiration at a man clearly unembarrassed by his femininity. His posh central-Thai accent suggested to me that Chompu was at the end of the line, shunted further and further away from mainline stations until he could regress no further. Here he was at the Pak Nam siding with nowhere to go.

We exchanged pleasantries and funny comments and sat down at the large Formica-topped table where upturned glasses, bottled water, small cellophane-covered packets of sweets, jumbo Pepsis and Cokes, and an island of artificial poinsettias waited for our meeting.

“Constable Yai is our briefing person,” said Chompu. “He has a super speaking voice. Our lady typist almost melts when she hears it. So gravelly.”

The constable blushed but he seemed to enjoy the compliment. He had a rather undernourished file in front of him. In fact, when he opened it, there appeared to be just the two sheets of paper inside.

“You have to realize,” he said, “that once the case is taken up by any of the central police agencies like the CSD’s Archive Registry in Bangkok, they aren’t obliged to keep us abreast of their ongoing investigations. What we have here is the result of our own inquiries and bits we’ve picked up locally, word of mouth, so to speak.”

I knew the Archive Registry. It was the elephant graveyard where old cases went to die. I’d done a piece on them for the Mail. Went down to Bangkok on the train and met up with the director. When any evidence of historical malfeasance came to light, they’d read the file and do a cursory cross-check through their computer banks. Unless a flag went up that it was connected to any ongoing inquiry, they’d bury it in an indexed grave and go on to the next. Don’t forget, they can’t even get the ongoing cases right. Who was going to care about thirty-year-old skeletons? The medusa had decided to trash that CSD piece, by the way, because it presented the police in a poor light. I didn’t bother to point out that most police lights were dim anyway.

I knew the two sheets that Constable Ma Yai held in front of him were all we’d have to go on.

“First,” he said, “the vehicle. Nothing.”

“Nothing?” said I.

“The registration plate is from 1972. The Surat motor registry department didn’t start to computerize their records until ninety-four. Everything before that was on card.”

“Doesn’t he speak well?” said Chompu. “Wasted. Wasted as a constable. He should be on the radio.”

I had to smile. I’d grown up with such out-of-order asides. I missed them.

“Where are the cards?” I asked.

“Well, you have to look at it like this. We’re in the south. Those cards have been through, what? Thirty monsoon seasons? Stuffed in sweaty old rusting file cabinets.”

“They’re destroyed?”

“Not by man, I’d say. By nature itself. Those that are still legible might be stored somewhere in boxes, but I’m not even sure where you’d look.”

“The Surat motor registry department didn’t know?”

“Said all their surviving card files were sent to Bangkok ten years ago.”

“I suppose it’s possible some poor little secretary’s there copying old registration records onto a database,” said Chompu. “They probably pay her a pittance and treat her badly. Whip her, I shouldn’t wonder.”

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. There was a Stephen King short story about the edge of time where the past just crumbled away one step behind you. In Thailand, everything before computerization had joined the rot. There wasn’t a great deal of motivation to go wading back through all that musty, mildewed smelly paper. Anew. Afresh. Forget the mistakes of the past and let’s start making our brand-new mistakes for the future. But where did that leave us and our VW?

“Do you have the engine and chassis numbers?” I asked.

The two policemen exchanged a condescending look of admiration. You learned to live with it. Yai copied the two numbers from his sheet and handed the slip of paper to me.

“Have you contacted VW Thailand?” I asked.

“They’re in Bangkok,” said the constable, as if that were reason enough not to try. Long-distance phone calls. Funny accents. Reports to fill out. Hassle. They might as well have been contacting Rio de Janeiro. I told them I’d see if I could get through.

“And that brings us to the bodies,” said the constable, flipping to his second sheet. “As there were no organs to examine, no flesh, no brain matter or stomach contents, the army pathologist in Prajuab could only say with any certainty that these were one male and one female. He wasn’t even sure how old they were. There were no visible traumas and, therefore, there was no obvious cause of death. But the head of the national forensic pathology institute is due down there in a few days and she might have a look.” He closed the file.

“That’s it?” I asked.

“Don’t you think it’s fascinating that they can tell the difference between male and female just from the bones?” Lieutenant Chompu said. “And they weren’t even connected.”

“You don’t watch a lot of television, do you?” I suggested.

“Lots. Why?” he replied. “How would that help?”

Right. The countryside. All Thai soap operas and game shows. Deprived of those rich satellite helpings of crime scene investigations. These people didn’t realize you could tell a man’s age, nationality, religion, belt size and sexual orientation from the bar of soap he washed with that morning. We had two complete skeletons and we couldn’t tell squat. Where was Kathy Reichs when you needed her?

“There was a label found among the surviving shreds of clothing,” said Yai, hopefully. “It said, ‘Made in India’.”

I remembered a suicide case in Chiang Rai a couple of years earlier when a foreigner was identified as Italian because he had his name in his shirt: Signore Armani.

“Labels can be misleading,” I said.

“Of course, you’re right,” said the lieutenant. “Has any of this been any help to you at all?”

“No.”

“Would you like to come and see the van now it’s uncovered?” he asked. “I could drive you.”

I had follow-ups to do for three newspapers and I had nothing to tell them. I held little hope that the fully excavated VW would offer up anywhere near enough insights to fill a column. Newspapers recognized fluff when they saw it and, as a country reporter, my offerings would be scrutinized very closely by the evil editors. I’d barely make it off the inside back page. I was dead again.

Lieutenant Chompu stopped off in the little officer’s room to freshen up and I was just about to walk out into the car park when I heard the booming voice of Major Mana. I ducked back behind a pillar.

“I wasn’t expecting you back today, sir,” said Sergeant Phoom in his usual jolly tone.

“Here is the last place I want to be, given what’s just happened,” said the major.

“Something serious, sir?”

From my nook between the pillars with a cardboard SAFE DRIVING accident cut-out blocking most of me, I was able to see the major walk to the desk, lean close to the sergeant, and whisper something. I couldn’t hear what he said but I noticed the sergeant reel backward as if he’d been slapped. This was a secret I wanted to know. I waited for the major to race up the stairs three at a time and I strolled over to the desk.

“Have you heard?” I asked.

“Heard what?” asked Sergeant Phoom, still pale from receiving the news.

“Oh, sorry. I thought the major would have told you by now.”

“Well…that depends.”

“Look, it doesn’t matter. I don’t think I’m allowed to share it with you if Major Mana hasn’t said anything.”

I turned and headed for the car park but I could hear his mind ticking over behind me.

“This wouldn’t have anything to do with” — and he lowered his voice — “the abbot?”

“See? You do know.” I smiled. “You’re just playing with me.” I walked back to his desk.

“Terrible thing, isn’t it?” he said.

“I was shocked. Shocked, I tell you.”

“We go three years with barely a punch on the nose and then, bang, two cases in the one day.”

My heart turned a little but I had to be careful now. I didn’t want to alienate one of my new friends at my local station but I had some fishing to do.

“What do you think happened?” I asked, leaning across his desk.

“Now, wait,” he said. “How do you know about it?”

“Sergeant Phoom,” I said, with my most sincere face attached, “I’m a reporter for national newspapers.”

“But there’s supposed to be a news blackout.”

“Never underestimate the power of the press. Come on, what’s your theory?”

I could hear Chompu speaking upstairs. My time was running out.

“Well, I don’t have many facts,” he confessed.

“But?”

I seemed to hover there for an inordinately long time before:

“But the stabbing to death of an abbot suggests a personal conflict to me.”

An abbot got stabbed? Holy mackerel. I was suddenly in the crime capital of the Eastern Seaboard. I was so excited I wanted to pee. Look out Pulitzer prize. I made a mental wai to the abbot for my disrespect. One last cast of the net.

“But wait, it’s out of your jurisdiction, isn’t it?” I tried.

“Not at all. Wat Feuang Fa is just on our side of road four-three-six. That’s the border. Anything on the other side is handled by Lang Suan.”

Chompu came tripping down the stairs and I pulled in my net. I had everything I needed. The lieutenant was shaking his hands in front of him. I took him for the type who didn’t trust communal hand towels.

“Ready?” he asked.

The VW visit had lost a certain amount of piquancy for me in the past few minutes but it would have been suspicious for me to cry off.

“And willing,” I said.

Old Mel was sitting on the back fence of his plantation wondering where all the peace and quiet had gone. He was admiring the water spraying from the heads of a dozen sprinklers. The blue PVC pipe upon which they perched snaked between the palms until it reached a sturdy Chinese pump. This in turn drew water from a newly dug pond at the center of which stood a rusty but surprisingly intact VW Kombi van.

“Good morning, Mel,” said Lieutenant Chompu.

“Morning,” said Mel.

The old man remembered me from the previous day’s dig. He briefly slapped his hands together in response to my wai. I imagine he’d read my news report that morning, which largely ignored the thirty-minute interview he’d given me on Saturday.

“Your well is surely the envy of the province.” Chompu smiled. “Such an attractive centerpiece.”

“Right,” laughed Mel. “Until the rust kills all my palms.”

“Nonsense,” said the policeman. “All that iron. They’ll flourish. You watch.”

The old man had been in a hurry to get his sprinklers working. I looked around at the plantation. Deep ditches ran between the rows of palms all the way from the road to about twenty meters from the back fence. Each contained a shallow trough of water. It was a confusing layout. One that didn’t make sense.

“Koon Mel,” I said (selecting the polite ‘Mr.’ over the less-than-polite ‘Old’), “can you tell me why the ditches don’t extend all the way to the rear fence?”

“Ah,” said Mel. “We dug the ditches fifteen years ago. I was a lot fitter then. Me and my brothers dug them by hand. None of that mechanized backhoe stuff. Everyone was still planting coconut palms back then. Only a few of us had the foresight to see the future of palm oil. Now everyone’s cutting down their coconut trees and planting palms. We were the pathfinders.”

“So, why…?” I pushed.

“Oh, right. Well, back then the ditches did go all the way to the back fence. But about seven years ago the owner of the land out there came by and asked if I’d like to buy another three hectares to extend our plantation. He said they had properties to develop and needed to sell off some of his scrubland in a hurry to grab some good building real estate in Phuket. He needed cash in hand so he was selling cheap. We had money in the bank so I said yes.”

I walked to the pit and looked at the rusty VW.

“So, this vehicle was actually buried on your neighbor’s land,” I said.

“Yeah.”

From the truck, Lieutenant Chompu had removed a large Government Savings Bank umbrella which he now held over us to keep off the sun. He remained silent as I continued my questioning.

“And what do you know about your neighbor?” I asked.

“Chinese.”

I’d heard the word ‘Chinese’ on numerous occasions down here, not used as a description of ethnicity but more to explain a multitude of ills. In a lot of South-East Asian countries there were us — the natives — and them — the Chinese business community. Old Mel had decided that ‘Chinese’ gave me all the information I needed about his neighbor. The land beyond the fence was twenty-odd hectares of overgrown grass and shrub land. People parked their cattle there year-round to graze for free.

“Did your neighbor offer to sell you the whole lot?” I asked.

“No.” Mel shook his head. “I asked, but he wasn’t interested.”

“Just the three hectares?”

“Yeah.”

Just the strip of land that incidentally happened to contain two dead bodies in a VW. Some coincidence. I decided it might not be a bad idea to locate the owner and have a little chat.

“Fancy a paddle?” Chompu asked, nodding in the direction of the van.

I couldn’t say I was fond of the idea but that was the reason the nice lieutenant had brought us here. I doubted the investigators had left too many stones unturned but I kicked off my sandals, rolled up the legs of my jeans to my knees and lowered myself into the warm, stewy pond. The water only came to my shins but the gunk below it was so soft I sank to my thighs. Jeans probably ruined. To his credit, the lieutenant was right there beside me. We waded one cursory circuit of the old van. Things were slithering around my feet. I wanted to go home. I half expected a Transformer moment where the old VW reared up on its hind wheels and snapped at us but, of course, it didn’t.

I reached the side where the sliding door had once been. It now lay beneath my feet, giving me some solid base upon which to stand and examine just how ruined my jeans were. I climbed into the belly of the beast and sat on one of the two stubs that had once been front seats. In no time, the salt air would consume this museum piece but today it stood defiant. The steering wheel poked out gamely before me. I grabbed it, half expecting it to crumble like the driver but it was surprisingly solid. A testament to German engineering. The seat, too, felt secure. The back had wilted but the square of springs beneath my bottom still squeaked when I moved. My feet were submerged in water still but I imagined that the water had only risen once the pit was dug; otherwise I doubted all this metal could have survived. The windscreen in front of me was intact. The view was a wall of dirt, but I had an active imagination: a hippy driver and his companion.

“You happy, babe?”

“Blissful.”

“Glad you came?”

“Yeah. You OK to drive?”

“Sure. Not much traffic. Floating really.”

“Want another smoke?”

“Why not, sweet baby? Why not?”

Mair had told me about the hippies, the cheap foreigners who came on her treks. They didn’t come for the nature or the culture. They came for the opium and the mushrooms. She didn’t say she’d joined in. That’s one of the gaps I had to fill in myself. But Mair was something special. She’d been a lot of things. I’m guessing she was a communist for a while — spent time hiding out in the jungle during the military dictatorships. I remember hearing she’d spent time as a karaoke lounge waitress. Then she grew pomelos out in Kanchanaburi and raised, I think it was, pigs. But what I remember most warmly is her time as a tour guide. That’s where most of her stories came from. Granny Noi was still alive then. She ran the shop in those days. Granddad Jah was with the police. They’d look after us when Mair was away on her tours. Her homecomings were like someone turning on a tree swathed in fairy lights. She’d have stories to tell us about exotic and weird places and even weirder people. She’d bring bags full of sweets and souvenirs, hand-crafted cloths that she’d sat and watched being woven, shells from the islands, animals crafted from straw and beautiful colored stones. I had a collection of dirt from every province in Thailand. It was New Year’s every time Mair came back. Then, one time, she came home and she didn’t go away again and, one by one, the fairy lights went out.

But one thing I’ll never forget is Mair laughing about the resolve with which the stingy, locally labeled ‘bird shit’, foreigners hung on to their weed. Ganja was growing all around but in their drug-induced bouts of paranoia they’d protect their own personal stash with their lives. It was very Granddad Jah of me to assume that everyone in the seventies smoked dope. But the combination of Kombi, long hair and beads made me think I could get away with being prejudiced just this once. And I wondered where our VW couple kept their stash.

“Who did the search of the van?” I asked Chompu, who was tugging the sliding door out of the mud.

“The boss sent Senior Sergeant Major Tort to go over it.”

“And he’s a forensics expert?”

“No. He keeps our books in order.”

“So, nobody’s really…”

“Nope.”

“And who’s in charge of the case?”

“Me.”

“So why haven’t you…?”

“Because I was just bequeathed it by Major Mana in front of the toilet door in the upstairs corridor of the police station half an hour ago. He doesn’t want it anymore. Something else came up.”

It certainly did. But the fact that nobody had really looked at the VW gave me new hope. The stash. The glove-box was a gaping hole. What was left of the mattress and all the trace evidence it contained was probably in a skip behind the police station. I didn’t have too many places to look. I felt under the seat and wished I hadn’t. It occurred to me later that this was where all the body fluids and loose parts would have found their way over the years. I wasn’t about to dive into the murky water and feel around. I was on the verge of giving up when I remembered the Web site. I’d had to look up the make of the VW before I could send my report. The site had photos of a renovation and there behind the driver’s seat was a mound — some toolbox or the like — but it had stuck in my mind. It would have been directly under the mattress. A perfect hiding place. I clambered behind the seats and reached down into the shallow water.

“You look inspired,” said Chompu.

I found a latch of some description and some rusty knobs.

“Have you got any tools in that truck of yours, Lieutenant?” I asked. “I think we might have something here.”

“Arny, Arny, not now.”

My brother was about to set off along the beach in the midday heat rolling his log. It was starting to irk me. It was up there with self-flagellation and cross-carrying. He stopped, sighed and walked over to me along the light brown sand. My brother was a creation, the answer to a problem. He’d been bullied at school due to his sensitive nature and the fact that his brother, four years his senior, wore lipstick to class. Arny spent more time playing with girls than boys so it had been relatively simple for bullies to single him out from the herd. If she’d been around more, my mother would have taught him to negotiate his way out of trouble, taught him the value of a well-placed joke. But he was left to the one-track male logic of Granddad Jah to sort him out. Toughen him up. Teach him to fight. Of course, he didn’t ever learn how to fight but he did bulk up. The deeper his frustration, the harder he hit the weights. He couldn’t punish the boys that were making fun of him so he punished himself. Every barb put another disk on the barbell. And soon the weight room became his sanctuary and his body his barricade.

And here he was, a mini-Mr. Universe. And the type of people who wanted to meet him saw an incredible hulk of a man. They assumed he ate pigs whole and smashed bricks with his forehead. Men wanted him as a friend because he was incredibly cool to be seen with. And women? Forget it. Once his love emotions were unscrewed there was nothing holding him together at all. Women assumed he was all animal, but in reality Arny was delicate. He was a sort of Grand Palace made of potato crisps. From a distance you saw invulnerability but you just had to lean on him slightly and he crumbled. It took a special kind of person to befriend a contradiction like that.

Arny and I were close. We’d been inseparable — now we were just close. Since we’d followed Mair down to non-event world we’d been oddly distant. We’d both been too busy locked up in our respective moods.

“What is it, pee?” It was nice to hear him call me ‘older sister’.

“Can you drive me somewhere?”

“OK.”

That’s the way it was with Arny. He’d always do what anyone asked whether he was busy or not. He’d never ask why. He’d always assume you had a good reason, otherwise you wouldn’t have asked. In fact I didn’t have a reason at all, not one I could explain. I just felt having Arny around on this trip might provide a distraction. Sometimes you have to follow your instincts. He was reversing the truck out of the carport when Mair came running out of the shop and stood directly behind us. Arny stamped on the brake.

“Now, what do you two think you’re up to?” she asked, her hands on her waist, John between her feet.

“Going for a drive,” I said. “Won’t be long.”

“I suppose you know how old you have to be before you can drive a vehicle on the main road,” she asked.

“Mair, I’m thirty-two,” Arny told her.

There was a pause, a brief awakening, then, “Well, then that’s all right, I suppose.”

She smiled and returned to the shop. We’d been on the road for five minutes when Arny turned to me.

“That wasn’t a joke, was it?”

“No.”

We turned our heads to admire a hedge of glaring yellow golden trumpet. It probably caused a lot of accidents.

“Do you think she’ll get worse?” he asked.

“No, not at all,” I lied. “All this fresh air and nature and healthy macrobiotic food and calcium. It’s big city pollution that eats away at people’s sanity. There are ninety-year-olds down here who can recall what they had for breakfast on their sixteenth birthday.”

Arny drove, focusing on the white lines.

“That’s because they’ve had the same breakfasts for the past ninety years,” he said.

I laughed. “You’re right.”

“We did the right thing.”

I knew he was talking about following Mair south.

“Yes, we did. She’ll get better. She just needs something to occupy her mind.”

“Yeah.”

We turned at an intersection where towering casuarina trees stood sentry on either side of us. I called it Christmas corner. I was always surprised that evergreen conifers could find it so easy to grow in the tropics. Didn’t they know where they were? I wondered if they had dreams of snow. They looked as out-of-place as us but they thrived. Perhaps we weren’t trying hard enough.

“We stopped being brother and sister,” Arny said.

“We’ve been angry.”

“I think it’s time to let it go.”

“You’re right.”

“It’s good here.”

“I know.”

I doubt whether a more unconvincing exchange had ever taken place on planet Earth. Both of us desperately wanted to believe it but didn’t have the acting skills to make it sound real. Before yesterday I doubt I would have even bothered to make the effort. But since then I’d been introduced to two dead hippies who were now giving up clues, and a dead abbot that nobody was allowed to talk about. I’d checked the wire services, the Web sites, even phoned the Thai Reporters’ Club information line. There was no news of a stabbed abbot. Either Major Mana had tossed out a red herring (a good source of vitamin D) or there really was a press blackout. But the only way to be certain was to go and see for myself. Nowhere in our electoral district was more than fifteen minutes away by truck when Arny was at the wheel.

“Do you think we’ll ever make any close friends down here?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I met some nice policemen today.” He looked sideways at me and laughed. “All right. I know that didn’t sound like me but it’s true.”

“Stop it, pee. I can’t drive and laugh at the same time.”

“Really, I…OK, never mind.”

It was nice to hear him laugh.

Feuang Fa temple was at the top of an incline with one of our rare hills as a backdrop. From the road it didn’t look like anything special but when you got to the top of the dirt track you could clearly see that it really was nothing special. There was a standard, rather dowdy prayer hall to the right, a cramped ordination hall, a gazebo and a stupa. None of these were worth investing adjectives on.

The highlight of the place was a spectacular bank of bougainvilleas on the crest of the hill to the left that followed a path toward the monks’ quarters at the rear. There had been little rain for several months and the plants were ablaze with color. Like Scotch whiskies, bougainvilleas were at their happiest without water.

We were only halfway up the hill when a middle-aged man in a slate gray safari suit and flip-flops stepped out from behind a large pregnant water urn with his hands up. He seemed to be some kind of low-budget sentry.

“Nothing for you here,” he shouted.

Arny braked and we stared at the scrawny man through the windscreen.

“Arny,” I said. “Remain calm. Don’t get into one of your flaps. If it helps, you can put your hands over your ears.”

I rolled down my window and gestured for the man to come to me. His footwear suggested he wasn’t police. I took a gamble.

“We’re hear to collect our father,” I said.

“There’s nobody here,” said the man. His voice and his teeth were great adverts for not smoking. “He’s probably left already.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” I said.

He squared his shoulders at me.

“If I tell you there’s nobody here, there’s nobody here. Just turn around and leave.”

Arny fumbled for reverse gear but I put my hand on his.

“I’m not leaving without my father,” I told him.

“I’ve told y — What does he look like?”

“About thirty centimeters high and silver.”

“What?”

“They cremated him yesterday. If we don’t take what’s left of him home, our Mair will give us no peace.”

The man hesitated. Fortunately he didn’t notice Arny’s look of shock. The sentry gazed once toward the temple, then back at us, then he stepped away and waved us through.

“Be quick,” he said as we passed.

“Thank you,” I replied, wai’d and wound up the window. “That’s weird, don’t you think? Closing a temple?”

“That wasn’t nice, pee.”

“What wasn’t?”

“Saying our dad’s dead.”

“You mean he’s not? Damn. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Its just…”

“I know. Not respectful. Can’t help but respect a creep who dumps a wife with three little babes.”

“He probably had his reasons.”

“Can’t you hate anyone, little brother? Can’t you just find it in your heart to sprinkle a handful of animosity here and there? This is the first time in thirty-two years our father’s been of any value to you. I think he’d be pleased to hear he’d contributed something, don’t you? Stop right here!”

“I…where?”

“Here. By the handcart.”

Arny pulled over and I opened the door.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Attacking from the rear.”

I climbed out.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Pull up noisily in front of the prayer hall, go inside…and pray.”

“What for?”

If this had been a Catholic church he could have asked for our normal service to be resumed: careers, social lives, respect, access to decent cheese, but Buddhist temples didn’t do wish lists.

“Just fake it.”

I closed the door quietly and ran behind a bush. From there I could see him pull away with a confused look on his face. I watched him drive over to the prayer hall and park the truck. Four laymen and two monks immediately stepped out of the side office and walked hurriedly toward him. They surrounded my brother like housecats round a rat. I have no idea what he said but I saw the truck door open, the men stand back, and Arny walk, shoulders hunched, into the prayer hall. A second later he reappeared, kicked off his sandals and went back in. Religion. It’s been a while.

Most temples down here have their resident nun. Nuns in Thailand don’t get nearly the same respect as monks. They cook for and feed the dogs, clean, look after the garden…Wait. This all sounds familiar. No wonder they look so sallow, the lot of them. But it’s that unspoken animosity that makes them more likely to give up top secret information.

I found my nun whitewashing a wall, half her head and one arm.

“Would you like me to just pour the can over you? It’d be quicker,” I said.

My nun smiled. She was in her sixties, I imagined, and she’d probably been a heartbreaker when she was younger. She wasn’t much taller than me but unless she had some spare brushes stuffed down her shirt she’d been much more generously endowed. An old monk draped in a robe was sitting on a step with his back to her. There were barely breathing dog carcasses littered all around like casualties of a major canine battle.

“Some can whitewash,” she said. “Some can repair cars. Of the two, whitewashing is my strongest hand so I suggest you don’t let me anywhere near your engine.”

I liked her. I suppose I could have thrashed around in the small-talk undergrowth for ten minutes and crept up on the subject, or I could just attack. I read her as more of the direct type.

“I heard your abbot got killed,” I said.

“You did?”

She let the fat brush drop to her side where it put another coat on her already white sarong.

“Yup.”

She seemed to be waiting for something.

“So, did he?” I asked.

“Get killed?”

“Yes.”

“Should we ask him?”

“I…?”

The pretty nun turned to the old monk sitting on the step. He appeared to be composing a psalm in the air with his long fingers.

“Jow a wat” she said, the formal address. “This young lady was wondering whether you’d been killed.”

My facts were undoubtedly less than accurate. The abbot wheeled around to look at me. He was weather-beaten like the wreck of a small canoe. His ribcage was an old Chinese abacus whose beads had been long lost, his face a clumsily sketched grid of experiences with pockmarks. Life had apparently had a go at him but he seemed comfortable in his ravaged body.

“No.” He smiled.

“Well, you can’t win them all,” I said.

“Hoping for a dead abbot, were you?” my nun asked, still smiling.

“In a way, yes,” I confessed. “But I’m also very pleased to see that the good father is alive and well.”

“And how would a death improve your quality of life, young lady?” asked the nun. “I watched you breach the security post and jump from a car and sneak up on us. So, I have to assume the news of a killing was important to you in some way.”

You know they’re often characters with shady pasts of their own, no more free from sin than you or I, but there’s something about a figure wrapped in saffron or virgin white that makes you want to tell the truth. So we sat, the three of us, and I gave them the blog version of the saga of my current life. They smiled and nodded along the entire journey, apparently fascinated by my decline. And I arrived at the juncture at which I now stood. And there was an exchange between them. If I’d been distracted by a hornet I might have missed it. And I agree I might very well be wrong, because monks and nuns and imams and Catholic priests are nothing more than little green space aliens in my mind. I’d been far too hip a teenager and too cynical a young thing to be snared by team religion. But I sensed there was a history between these two. I visualized it as a deep crimson pool in which they’d swum together somewhere in their past lives. I believe that brief unspoken look said:

“You tell her.”

“No, you tell her.”

There was a pause during which I heard our truck start, reverse and drive away, but I was too close here to give up and chase after it. The abbot coughed and spoke.

“Two of the men you saw walk out of my office are detectives from Bangkok. One other is a local detective from Lang Suan CID. Then there’s the head of our local council. The monks are attached to the Buddhist Sangba Supreme Council, a branch called the Pra Vinyathikum. If we were police it would be known as Internal Affairs. The reason I am not down there with them, even though this is my temple — my wat — is that I am being investigated. In fact it would appear I am the chief suspect in a murder inquiry.”

Good line.

In fact it was several seconds before I realized my jaw had dropped.

“Whose murder?” I asked.

The nun had taken up a curled, feline pose on the step beneath ours. It made me feel uncomfortable but I wasn’t about to get involved in stage direction. The abbot continued.

“The monks from the Pra Vinyathikum arrived here two days ago with an abbot. His name was Tan Winai. In fact I’d met him many years before. We’d developed a friendship then but had gone our separate ways. But he had been sent here by the council to investigate a complaint — about me. Before he left Bangkok we had spoken on the telephone so I knew he’d be coming. I told him he was welcome. They have the power to disrobe monks, but there is nothing they can do to an abbot apart from put in a report to the RAD: the Religious Affairs Department. The RAD would then conduct an inquiry of its own. So, this was a very initial investigation and none of us thought too seriously about it.”

“So the visiting abbot gave you details of the complaint against you?” I asked.

“He was very open. We discussed the matter at great length.”

“But you weren’t able to talk him out of pursuing the complaint.”

“It was an interesting debate. A very contentious area. One that is not clearly laid out in the Buddhist doctrines. In many respects I could see his side of the matter. I was keen to hear all of the arguments and make my own.”

“And you would have abided by his decision?”

“Of course.”

“What was the complaint?”

Both the abbot and the nun smiled.

“You speak your mind,” the nun said. She got to her feet and put her hand on my arm. It was my signal to walk with her. “You could very well be a southerner.”

That didn’t automatically register as a compliment and I was unhappy about being steered away before my question was answered. But I’d always been uncomfortably aware of rituals and unwritten rites in temples. I seemed to be the only one who didn’t know all the secrets. As children, Mair had hurried us in and out of ceremonies as if some spell might infect us if we lingered too long. Consequently I always felt like a foreigner with only a basic grasp of the language.

“So?” I pushed.

We were behind the half-painted wall. The nun’s voice dropped to a hush no louder than the swish of her robe.

“Abbot Kem here was accused by one of his flock of fornication,” she said.

I looked at her and took a stab.

“With you?”

“Yes.”

Nuns and monks and fornication. Is it any wonder I avoided it all? When I was at primary school we learned the golden rules by rote. None of them came to mind right now but…abbots sleeping with nuns didn’t seem to be OK.

“And did you?” I asked. “Did he?”

“No.”

“But you used to have…something.”

“We have known each other for many years,” said the nun. “We cared for each other. Before all this, before religion overwhelmed us, we had the most beautiful and pure friendship two people could ever know. We were, and remain, as close as any two creatures on this earth. We saw through one another’s eyes, breathed the same breaths.”

Perhaps I was being a bit dumb here and this probably wasn’t the right time to ask about sex, but it was all relevant.

“So even with all that eye sharing and co-breathing, it was still platonic?”

“Yes.”

“And you had this really nice connection but nothing came of it and you went your own ways and found religion?” I hoped I wasn’t being cynical.

“Yes.”

“And by chance, even though there are forty thousand wats in Thailand, by some quirk of fate, you ended up here together.”

She smiled again. “Of course not. We have always been in touch: letters, phone calls. We are like family. We have a connection. I think we always knew that we’d end up at the same place. Abbot Kem told me about the simple beauty of this region and I decided to move from the northeast.”

OK, the millionaire question. No friends to phone. No help from the audience.

“Are you still in love?” I asked.

The nun sighed deeply, then switched over to profound mode. She sandwiched her hands together in front of her lap and spoke to her toes. It felt rehearsed.

“When you understand the dharma,” she said, “all love and hate is absorbed into a greater appreciation of the universe. Personal likes and dislikes are irrelevant. You are no longer an individual. You are a part of the whole.”

Good speech. I didn’t believe her. I was annoyed not to have the abbot’s view of events. I needed to look into his eyes and see what his slant on all this was. For all I knew, this could all have been the nun’s personal fantasy. But somehow I doubted it.

“So, you don’t love each other anymore?” I asked.

I was probably sinning like hell by forcing a nun to answer personal questions about her love life, but I had a murder inquiry on my hands — at last. Thank God I wasn’t shackled by any of those guilt trips that are such a lovely feature of organized religion.

“My love encompasses all,” she said.

All right. Technically I’m a Buddhist. It’s written there on my ID card. But I was brought up as a sort of warped realist. My mother threw me into this modern world where I was supposed to make friends with technology and alien cultures. And although part of me believes there’s a higher plane where jogging and Big Brother Thailand and Bon Jovi aren’t important, I find it really hard to believe skinny old Abbot Kem had ever stopped loving the warmest nun on the planet. But was she worth killing the IA abbot for? I’d like to see Raymond Chandler get his chops around that one.

With the detectives and the IA monks back in the office detecting and my brother and his truck nowhere to be seen, I took the opportunity to visit the scene of the crime. The live abbot, Kem, was confined to the temple grounds but not to his quarters so he walked with me along the concrete path to the spot where the dead abbot, Winai, was found. A lethargic procession of temple dogs trailed along behind us. I attempted to push him on the relationship issue but he was mute on the subject. Not surprisingly, the body was no longer ahead of us on the path, but a large section of concrete had been stained a chewed-tobacco brown.

“Lot of blood,” I said.

“He was stabbed several times in the stomach,” Abbot Kem said.

I looked around. It wasn’t a secluded spot at all. I could see the road clearly down the hill with our truck pulled up beside it. To the north, anyone visiting the prayer hall, the monks, the nun, all of them had a clear view of where we now stood. And at our backs, the bright bank of bougainvilleas in full bloom reared up like an advertising hoarding declaring: MURDER OF THE DAY.

“Who found the body?” I asked.

“I did.”

“What time?”

“Just after three yesterday afternoon.”

“What made you come up here?”

“The dogs. There was a lot of commotion. They’re normally asleep around that time when the air’s at its driest. I was afraid they’d come across a cobra. When I got here I found the abbot dead on the path.”

“You came all this way because of a snake? Are you a snake charmer, Abbot?”

“Most of the snakes up here are harmless but we lose a lot of the dogs to cobra bites. The snakes only bite in self-defense so it’s often merely a question of refereeing. I have a cane basket. I get between the dogs and plonk it upside down on top of the snake and sit on it. When the dogs get bored and go home, I release the snake.”

“So, in fact, you’re rescuing the snake?”

“In a way, yes.”

I’d heard some wild witness statements in my time but that was a good one. However, unless any of the snakes were prepared to give evidence, it didn’t do a thing for Abbot Kem. I thanked him and watched him stroll back along the path, stopping here to pick up broken branches, there to pluck a dead leaf from a plant. As I walked down to the truck, I considered the variables. One resounding question that stuck in my mind was: Would a man who valued life enough to step between a pack of dogs and a cobra be able to kill another human being? But, I’d seen stranger things.

“How did you manage to talk your way past all those policemen?” I asked Arny as I climbed into the truck.

“I didn’t have to.”

“You must have said som — Oh, you were anxious, weren’t you?” He nodded. “And when you’re anxious your eyes water.” He nodded again. “And they thought you were crying and in desperate need to pray.”

“It was stressful,” he confessed.

I could picture the scene. Arny steps out of the truck. He’s surrounded. He panics. The detectives decide the only reason a one-hundred-kilogram brick barn would burst into tears is if he’s in desperate need of salvation. See? I knew there was a reason to bring Arny along. I climbed up his left side and gave him a kiss on the cheek. He liked it.